#Duke stays away from this whole mess b/c he actually has a life

[collectivefandomstuff]

It starts one evening when Bruce is off-world and Alfred has invited (ordered) everyone to the manor for a cup of tea. Predictably, this soon devolves into bickering which somehow morphs into all the kids sharing stories about their time in the manor, trying to out-do each other. Here, Alfred starts telling them stories about the people who have lived in this house before; generations of Waynes long gone. One in particular, he tells them, a young woman called Catherine, suffered terribly through her life and died at the hands of a scorned lover in this very house. Sometimes, Alfred claims, you can hear her ghost wandering through the halls, singing sorrowfully or weeping.  

Damian scoffs at this and says that it’s “clearly nonsense”.

And that’s when it truly starts, with one of the kids having the idea that “a few weird noises here, a fluttering curtain there... it should be doable to convince my pseudo-siblings that there’s a ghost.” Except this is the batfamily who are all complete trolls so it’s not one of the kids. It’s all of them. Even Damian figures that “Drake is gullible” and it would be worth the trouble to scare the shit out of Tim.

And so the great ghost-campaign of 2012 begins. Tim and Steph quickly pair up for maximum effect; with Tim putting speakers in the vents that plays a track he found online called “ethereal crying” and Steph taking on the role as “Catherine”, sweeping down the halls in a wig and a floaty gown and fake crying into a handkerchief.

Damian, being tiny, crawls through the vents, playing recordings of a woman crying near wherever Tim is at the moment (doing this he actually manages to break one of Tim’s speakers. He doesn’t notice). When Tim is caught without airpods and actually hears Damian’s recording, he thinks Steph must really be working overtime on the ghost thing.

Dick spends hours crouched on top of beams and chandeliers making sniffling noises, and leaves silk gloves with the initials “C.W.” embroidered on them on everyone’s pillows. Damian is the only one who notices, since only he and Tim actually sleep at the Manor and Tim is always way too sleep-deprived to either take note of or care about what’s on his pillow.

Damian decides that Tim’s the one who left the glove and vows to double his efforts. Tim remains oblivious to the crusade against him.

Jason sneaks into the Manor at night to leave fake blood on the floor outside the west wing. Cass finds him and convinces him that fake blood won’t cut it and they both get way too involved and end up “donating” their own blood to the cause. The blood is mopped up by Alfred before any other sibling can find it.

Damian places portable air-conditioners on the coldest setting over Tim’s favorite spots in the Cave and Library. Tim starts wearing scarfs.

Dick dresses up as a Victorian Lady and stalks the halls of the manor, lamenting “her” fate. In the dark, a been-awake-for-48-hours and high-on-caffeine Tim mistakes him for Stephanie and greets him way too loudly with “diD You GeT A nEW DResS?” This freaks Dick out entirely and he falls out of the open window he had been sadly mourning his death in front of.

Jason and Cass get really stuck on the whole blood thing and leaves a torn-up, bloodied white dress on a hook in the library. Stephanie takes one look at it and thinks that someone has stolen HER dress and ruined it, and takes it as proof for a later date.

Damian, slightly departing from the “ghost persona” in favour of torturing Tim, starts leaving thorny roses where Tim will step on them with bare feet, which is mostly in the shower.

Tim starts questioning his sleeping-schedule and resolves to maybe dial back on energy drinks. He also puts everyones shoes in the freezer when they come over and return them to the hall before they leave, so they’ll think a cold chill has just passed along the floor.

On the whole, they’re all too busy to actually notice what everyone else is up to -or get frightened by it. Bruce however, is not.

Newly returned from off-world, he starts noticing things. Voices in the vents, drafts in the cave, blood on the floor outside the west wing (that he has Alfred mop up). All the kids are fine, but obviously someone is breaking into his house. Obviously.

This leads him to scour the cctv footage where he sees a strange, crying woman meandering through the halls at night. When he investigates the blood, the camera shows him a shadowy figure standing right where the blood was (Cass, geared up because both she and Jason takes this way, way, too seriously). 

His paranoia now fully woken from its (very light) slumber, he tries to find the hole in the Manor’s defenses. Late one evening, when he’s coming back from patrolling the grounds, he sees a victorian woman fall from a second story window with a scream and land in a heap of skirts. When he gets there, she’s gone (Dick made himself scarce, not wanting to be discovered by Tim), but a few days later, he thinks he sees a bloodied, ripped dress on one of the cameras in the library. When he gets there, it’s gone. Meanwhile, Titus keeps bringing him silk gloves with strange initals on them and he hears sniffling cries and singing everywhere. Finally, he reaches a logical explanation.

“I have seen stranger things” he tries to comfort himself, even as he’s putting up fifty new cctv cameras and lines the corridors with salt for good measure. “aliens. demons. the Court of Owls.” He researches ghost-prevention techniques and contemplates whether martial arts would have an effect on a non-entity. He buys iron and re-watches Ghost Busters. Finally, he believes himself both well-equipped enough to handle the threat, and well-informed enough to accurately decide what it is exactly (a ghost born of tradegy, not vengeful but possibly dangerous if crossed).

Confident that he now has the situation back under control, Bruce holds a briefing with all the kids to explain and assign roles for the mission to get rid of the ghost. For years after the fact he vehemently denies this meeting ever taking place and tries (unsuccessfully) to track down all copies of the photos and videos his children took during the six hours of ghosthunting he led them on before one of them (Dick) finally lost it enough for Bruce to notice.